How To Use The Stokastic Sims For DFS Cash Games

The Sims have a reputation as a tournament weapon, and that reputation is earned. But one of the questions we field most often is a quieter one: "This is great for GPPs, but what do I actually do for DFS cash games?" It's a fair question, because cash is a different game with a different goal, and the way you point the Stokastic Sims for cash games changes accordingly. The good news is that the staff method is almost boringly simple, and by the end of this you'll know the one sort that actually matters, why "percent to first" is not the lever people think it is, and how to spend two minutes vetting the lineup before you fire it.

TL;DR

• All Of DFS Cash Game Strategy Starts Here: Cash Rewards Floor, Not Ceiling. You only need to beat roughly half the field, so you want the safest, highest-projected lineup, not the contrarian one. (The full format split is in cash games vs GPPs.)
• The Staff Method: run the Contest Generator, let the Sims build the pool, then sort by raw projection (not simulated ROI) and take the top build.
• Percent To First Barely Matters For Cash. It changes how lineups are graded, not what field gets generated, and you're sorting on projection anyway. If you touch it at all, use the low, consistency end.
• One Lineup, Entered Everywhere. Copy that top build into every cash game and head-to-head, the way most pros do. Keep it separate from your GPP builds.
• Vet It Before You Fire It. Drop that one build into the Single Lineup Simulator and the tool surfaces its cash rate, its ROI, and how it actually wins — the same check staff run on reader lineups in office hours.
• Same Tool, Two Jobs: floor-first for cash, upside for tournaments. Full Stokastic Sims access does both in one workflow.

Watch: Contest Sims And How They Build Lineups

Before the method, here's Greg Ehrenberg and Steve Buzzard walking through the Contest Generator in our NFL build. The tool works the same way on any sport's slate, so the MLB example further down is the identical workflow with different names in it.

Watch on YouTube

Cash Games Are A Different Game Than Tournaments

The two versions of this question we keep getting are worth reading closely, because they tell you where people get stuck. One is "When using sim for cash games, what % to first should be used?" The other is "For NHL cash games, do you target ownership or value initially?" Both assume the answer is a setting — some dial you turn to put the machine in cash mode. It isn't. Both readers are already inside the tournament frame, reaching for a tournament lever.

Here's the reframe. Cash games (double-ups, 50/50s, head-to-heads) pay everyone above the line the same, so you don't need to win the slate, you need to beat roughly half the field. That flips what you're optimizing: a GPP asks for a ceiling and differentiation, cash asks for the highest floor you can build, the lineup least likely to have a hole in it. And the sim doesn't have a floor dial. What it has is two ways to rank the same generated pool — by simulated ROI, or by raw projection — and the entire cash method lives in that choice, not in the settings panel.

So the honest answer to both questions above is "neither, and here's what to do instead." Which is the method itself.

The Staff Cash Method: Build The Pool, Then Sort By Projection

Here's the whole method, and it's the one staff have walked through in office hours: build your player pool like you always would and let the Contest Generator produce its lineups, then, instead of ranking that output by simulated ROI, sort the lineups by raw projection and take the highest-projected builds off the top. That's it. You're using the Sims as a lineup builder and sorting the output by projection, not by tournament upside.

1. Open the Contest Generator (the contest sims surface) for your sport and load the slate.
2. Set your player pool the usual way and let the Sims build the lineups (they factor stack correlation in for you).
3. Sort the generated lineups by projection, not simulated ROI.
4. Take the top lineup, or the top few if you're spreading a little.

Prefer to work from your own numbers? You can do the exact same thing in the pre-contest simulator with your projections uploaded and sort those by projection. Either path lands you in the same place: the highest-projected build the tool can find, which is the floor-first lineup you want for cash.

This works because of the split between the two jobs I mentioned up top. The Contest Generator is a tournament tool by design, but it still generates the lineup pool either way. What changes for cash is only your decision rule: you pick on raw projection instead of simulated ROI, because the goal is clearing the cash line rather than maximizing first-place equity. You never have to touch a tournament lever to do it.

A Quick Worked Example

Let me walk the exact clicks I'd make for a cash lineup on a typical MLB main slate (same Sims workflow as our MLB DFS Sims guide). I open the Contest Generator, load the slate, and build the slate pool as usual rather than stripping it down to a hand-picked shortlist. Then I go to the lineup output and switch the sort from simulated ROI over to projection. The build that pops to the top is my cash lineup: the highest total projected points the tool can assemble under the cap, with the Sims still handling stack correlation so I'm not left holding a scattered roster.

From there I do almost nothing:

• No ROI boosts for leverage.
• No portfolio-style exposure tinkering, since I'm only playing one lineup.
• No touching percent to first.
• Copy that one lineup into every cash game and head-to-head on the slate.

Total time is a couple of minutes, most of it spent confirming nobody in the build is a late scratch. That is the entire cash workflow, and the discipline is in what you don't do to it.

Tip: Projections keep moving through lock as lineups, injuries, weather, and odds land, so re-sort right before you lock and watch for late scratches. One benched hitter can wreck a floor lineup you thought was set. Our Live Before Lock show is built for exactly that pre-lock window.

Why "Percent To First" Is The Wrong Lever For Cash

This is the one that trips people up, because the most common cash question is literally "what percent to first should I set?" Here's the honest answer: for cash, it barely matters, and reaching for it is a small warning sign.

Percent to first changes how lineups are graded, not what field gets generated. In a GPP you match it to the payout: a $1 million prize pool that pays $200,000 to first is a 20% to first contest. We ran the Masters Milly Maker sims at 25% because that contest's first-place share was higher. A high setting there ranks contrarian, ceiling-chasing builds higher, which is exactly right when you have to finish first; a low setting favors consistent, chalkier lineups. Since the cash method sorts on projection rather than on that simulated grade, the setting is mostly moot. If you do lean on it at all, cash wants the consistent end of the dial, never the high, contrarian tournament setting.

So keep the tournament tools in the tournament lane. Simulated ROI, leverage, and a cranked percent-to-first are how you win a GPP; they are not a cash workflow. The table below is the full split.

The row I keep coming back to is ownership. In a GPP, being off the field's chalk is where a lot of your edge lives. In cash, chasing that same leverage actively works against you, because you're trading floor for a differentiation you don't need. Fade the urge to get cute; the boring lineup is the correct one.

Building your cash lineup by projection? The Stokastic Sims do the job in one place: they generate your lineups and grade them against a simulated contest field, so you get our projections and the finished cash build without a separate optimizer. Take 10% off your first payment with code CASHSIMS10. Start with the Sims

One Lineup, Entered Everywhere

Once you have your top cash build, you don't need to reinvent it for every contest. The same lineup across all your cash games and head-to-heads is fine, and it's what most pros do. There is no separate head-to-head DFS strategy to learn here either: projection first, ownership secondary. What does change in a head-to-head is the variance around that lineup. A 50/50 grades you against the middle of a whole field, so one opponent running hot barely moves you. Head-to-head, that same hot opponent beats you outright. That's an argument for volume rather than for a different build, which is exactly why the same lineup goes into all of them.

The one thing to keep straight is that this is not the same lineup you fire into GPPs. Cash and tournaments call for opposite builds, so you'll have your one floor-first cash lineup living everywhere in your cash pool, and a separate, more differentiated set of builds for the tournaments. One tool, two opposite assignments.

Vet The One Build With The Single Lineup Simulator

Here's where that "one lineup everywhere" decision earns you something. Because a single build is carrying your whole cash slate, it's worth one more pass, and the Single Lineup Simulator is built for exactly that kind of vetting pass. Feed it your finished cash lineup and it simulates that specific build against the contest field: the tool surfaces the lineup's cash rate, its ROI, and the ways it actually wins, instead of leaving you to trust a sort order.

It's one of our most overlooked tools, which is a shame, because it's also the one that answers the question a cash player actually has: is this build safe, or does it only look safe? Staff grade reader lineups with it live in office hours, and the swaps are rarely dramatic. In one of those sessions a single player swap moved a build from 50% ROI to 103% ROI in the sim, because the second version told a coherent story of how it wins. That's the value of a vetting pass. You aren't rebuilding; you're checking whether the build you already have holds up.

The cash check, in one pass: paste the build in, read the cash rate, glance at how it wins, and only then enter it everywhere. That is the entire vetting pass.

Use it as an A/B tool too. Torn between two cash builds? Run both and compare the cash rates before you choose. And be clear about the hierarchy while you do it, because this is where readers get tangled: the projection sort picks your lineup, the sim is a check on it, not a veto. When the top-projected build comes back with a materially worse cash rate than the one behind it, that's usually a correlation problem or a player you should be looking at anyway. It is not a reason to rebuild off a single sim run. Notice what you still haven't touched through all of this: percent to first and the rest of the tournament dials are exactly where you left them. Which raises the fair question a few of you are already asking.

Do You Even Need The Sims For Cash?

It's a fair pushback: if the cash method is "sort by projection," couldn't you do that anywhere? You could, but the Sims give you the projections and the finished, correlation-aware build in one workflow, which is why regular Sims users in our Discord say they've dropped their standalone optimizer entirely. If you want the full breakdown of why, we made the case in Stokastic Sims vs. optimizers.

The projections behind that build are also the part that moves the needle more than it looks. They start updating early in the day and keep moving through lock as lineups, weather, and odds shift, so the highest-projected cash build you pull at noon can look different by first pitch. It's worth a last sort right before you lock. To sanity-check the pieces before you build, the live projections in the DataHub show you what's driving the numbers.

Have a real read on a player? The pre-contest simulator lets you upload your own projections and build from those. One honest caution we always give: the sim takes your word for it. Change a projection and every lineup with that player gets graded on your assumption, so a fat-fingered 50 that becomes 500 will make a build look elite for no reason. When your read is right, that's your edge over the field; just re-check the big edits before you trust a run.

A Few Honest Caveats

Cash is lower-variance than a Milly Maker, not no-variance, so you'll still lose nights where a floor build ran into a bad beat. The place to sort that out is the Post-Contest Simulator, which shows the long-term expected ROI of the lineups you actually played. Two readings it will hand you are worth knowing before you go looking, because both are easy to misread after a bad evening.

The first: a lineup can lose and still have been a good play. That is the whole reason the review room exists, and it's the reading that keeps you from tearing up a process over one night. The second is the non-obvious one: a lineup can come back showing negative sim ROI mostly because a player came in far higher-owned than projected. Nothing about your build got worse — the field simply crowded onto the same name. For a GPP that's a real cost. In cash, where you only have to clear the line, it usually isn't the thing that beat you, and misreading it is how cash players talk themselves into chasing leverage they don't need.

Which is where this lands. Remember the two reader questions we opened with, both reaching for a dial. There was never a dial. The Sims' cash job is to hand you the highest-projected lineup fast, and yours is to leave it alone, enter it everywhere it belongs, and spend the creativity you saved on the contests that actually pay for it.

FAQ

What percent to first should I use for cash games in the Sims? For cash you're sorting lineups by projection, not by simulated ROI, so percent to first barely matters. If you set it at all, use the low, consistency-favoring end, never the high contrarian setting you'd use for a top-heavy tournament.

Can I use the same lineup for all my cash games and head-to-heads? Yes. One highest-projected build entered across every cash game and head-to-head is standard practice. Just don't reuse that same lineup in your GPPs, where you want a more differentiated build.

In cash games, should I target ownership or value? Neither, exactly: target projection. Value in DFS means points per dollar, which is a tool for fitting the cap, not the objective itself. The objective is the highest total projected points you can assemble under the cap, and the projection sort finds that build for you. This holds across sports, whether you're playing MLB, NBA, or NHL cash. Ownership and leverage are tournament tools; in any sport's cash you build the highest-projected lineup and let the ownership games happen in the GPPs.

Do I need an optimizer if I use the Sims for cash? No. The Sims build and grade the lineups themselves, which is the job an optimizer plus hand-curation used to do. Sort the Sims output by projection and take the top build.

Are the Contest Sims only for tournaments? They're built for GPPs, and that's where their leverage and simulated-ROI tools shine. But the lineup builder underneath works for cash too, as long as you sort by projection and leave the tournament levers alone.

New to the Sims? They build your cash lineup by projection and your GPP lineups by upside, all in one place. Take 10% off your first payment with code CASHSIMS10.

get the Stokastic Sims You can also try the free Sims or browse projections in the DataHub first.